Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion: Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls, by Alan S. Kahan

Abstract

Alan S. Kahan’s latest book gives us just what it promises: a comprehensive new English account of the place of religion in Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought. While there are good works that look at Tocqueville’s writing on religion and American democracy, Catholicism and the French Revolution, or Islam in Algeria, the disparate contexts in which Tocqueville raised religious questions have very rarely been brought together, and never in such a sustained way. However dispersed Tocqueville’s discussions of religion were across his œuvre, this book shows that the subject remained central throughout. For Kahan, this is because Tocqueville was a ‘moralist’: operating within a French tradition embracing La Bruyère, Rousseau and Chateaubriand, he saw his political and moral ideas as essentially interdependent. Yet unlike devoutly Catholic thinkers, Tocqueville—who, even though he remained to some degree a practising Catholic, had actually lost his faith in his teens—saw religion as a means rather than an end. Kahan particularly argues that religion formed part of the ‘checks and balances’ that Tocqueville thought necessary to the proper functioning of democratic societies. Religious beliefs and institutions check democratic governments by ‘raising barriers to arbitrary action’ (p. 79). At the same time, religion balances individual citizens’ tendencies towards materialism and individualism. When Tocqueville encouraged religion, then, it formed part of addressing his fundamental dilemma: how can we foster the development of human grandeur and liberty in a democratic society?